Saturday, January 26, 2019

The journal Diritti umani e diritto internazionale has issued a call for submissions for a forum on "Deconsolidation of Democracy, Populism, and the Role of Human Rights Law/Scholars" that will appear in its summer issue. The call is here.

Under what circumstances can a state refuse refugee status to a person whose risk of persecution exists in only part of her country of origin? This book is the first monograph to examine the treaty basis and criteria for the ‘internal protection alternative’ (IPA), an exception to refugee status increasingly invoked by state parties to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol. Through a critical analysis of the relationship between refugee law and related fields, Schultz finds that the legal scope for IPA practice is narrower than is commonly claimed. Since persons subject to an IPA analysis have a well-founded fear of persecution within their countries of origin, any limit on their right to refugee status must involve a careful balancing of the impact of continued displacement against the state's interest in preserving its restricted protection resources. She argues that the doctrine of implied limits in human rights law can provide analytic structure to the IPA concept and reduce the risk of overly broad application.

This book examines the international legal regime covering trade in legal services. While legal services are a vital component of the economies of many developed and emerging countries, they remain poorly liberalized with numerous restrictions undermining market access for foreign suppliers. Although some modern bilateral and regional trade agreements have begun to address barriers to trade in legal services, few go beyond the basic commitments of non-discrimination and transparency contained in the WTO GATS. This book approaches the pressing need to open the global market for trade in legal services across the four modes of supply: cross border, consumption abroad, commercial presence and temporary movement of natural persons. It considers changes under way within the legal profession brought about by alternative business structures and technology. Both underscore the importance of reconceptualizing trade in legal services as one that should be as open as possible with a view to maximizing competition while safeguarding the needs of clients.

When multinational corporations cause mass harms to lives, livelihoods, and the environment in developing countries, it is nearly impossible for victims to find a court that can and will issue an enforceable judgment. In this work, Professor Maya Steinitz presents a detailed rationale for the creation of an International Court of Civil Justice (ICCJ) to hear such transnational mass tort cases. The world's legal systems were not designed to solve these kinds of complex transnational disputes, and the absence of mechanisms to ensure coordination means that victims try, but fail, to find justice in country after country, court after court. The Case for an International Court of Civil Justice explains how an ICCJ would provide victims with access to justice and corporate defendants with a non-corrupt forum and an end to the cost and uncertainty of unending litigation - more efficiently resolving the most complicated types of civil litigation.

On March 12-14, 2019, Tom Ginsburg (Univ. of Chicago - Law) will deliver the 2019 Sir Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lectures at the University of Cambridge. There will also be a question and answer session on March 15. The topic of the lectures is: "Democracies and International Law: The Trials of Liberalism."

Global intellectual property rules have had adverse consequences for the promotion and protection of a range of human rights, including the rights to food, health, water, culture, equality and non discrimination, and freedom of expression. Nonetheless, these issues have been framed in human rights terms primarily at the international and regional levels. Domestic human rights advocates have largely not taken up the issue of how intellectual property law affects the enjoyment of human rights.

This Article argues that this incomplete translation is due to widespread reliance on a fairly narrow understanding of human rights. Human rights, when understood only as a set of legal rules and institutions, inevitably devolves into a debate about reconciling conflicting rights. This is an important conversation, but it is also a limiting one. The emancipatory potential of human rights often lies not in its power as a set of legal rules but in the way in which those rules can be employed by affected individuals to make claims and demand political change.

Using the case study of law and politics around intellectual property mobilization, the Article argues that framing intellectual property in more robust human rights terms is important for challenging the fundamental power structures that undergird the intellectual property regime. The Article then argues that the Marrakesh Treaty — a new treaty that requires states to create mandatory exceptions to copyright to protect the rights of individuals with disabilities — charts a new path for human rights advocacy on intellectual property. This treaty has the potential to lay a foundation for better translation of intellectual property issues into human rights advocacy by identifying a clear violation and by activating domestic human rights advocates. Creating a foundation for affected individuals and human rights advocates to participate in intellectual property lawmaking is essential to realizing the potential of human rights for revising the essential bargains of the international intellectual property system.

On February 15, 2003, millions of people around the world demonstrated against the war that the United States, the United Kingdom, and their allies were planning to wage in Iraq. Despite this being the largest protest in the history of humankind, the war on Iraq began the next month. That year, the World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) emerged from the global antiwar movement that had mobilized against the invasion and subsequent occupation. Like the earlier tribunal on Vietnam convened by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, the WTI sought to document—and provide grounds for adjudicating—war crimes committed by the United States, the United Kingdom, and their allied forces during the Iraq war.

For the Love of Humanity builds on two years of transnational fieldwork within the decentralized network of antiwar activists who constituted the WTI in some twenty cities around the world. Ayça Çubukçu illuminates the tribunal up close, both as an ethnographer and a sympathetic participant. In the process, she situates debates among WTI activists—a group encompassing scholars, lawyers, students, translators, writers, teachers, and more—alongside key jurists, theorists, and critics of global democracy.

WTI activists confronted many dilemmas as they conducted their political arguments and actions, often facing interpretations of human rights and international law that, unlike their own, were not grounded in anti-imperialism. Çubukçu approaches this conflict by broadening her lens, incorporating insights into how Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Iraqi High Tribunal grappled with the realities of Iraq's occupation. Through critical analysis of the global debate surrounding one of the early twenty-first century's most significant world events, For the Love of Humanity addresses the challenges of forging global solidarity against imperialism and makes a case for reevaluating the relationships between law and violence, empire and human rights, and cosmopolitan authority and political autonomy.

This book addresses the increased role and standing of international law in the Russian legal system through analysis of judicial practice since the adoption of the Russian Constitution in 1993. The issue of interaction and hierarchy between international and domestic law within the Russian Federation is studied, combining theoretical, legal and institutional elements.
Sergey Marochkin explores how methods for incorporating and implementing international law (or reasons for failing to do so) have changed over time, influenced by internal and global policy. The final sections of the book are the most illustrative, examining how 'the rule of law’ remains subordinate to ‘the rule of politics’, both at the domestic and global level.

From the Board, International Trade and the Regulation of Responsible Global Value Chains

Jonathan Mukwiri, Brexit and Implications for the Free Movement of Capital

Roberto Soprano, The Principle of Effectiveness in the Interpretation of the Protocol of Accession of China to the World Trade Organization: Market Economy Considerations in Anti-Dumping Investigations

A reminder that a call for papers has been issued for the Eighth Annual Junior Faculty Forum for International Law, convened by Dino Kritsiotis (Univ. of Nottingham - Law), J.H.H. Weiler (New York Univ. - Law), Simon Chesterman (National Univ. of Singapore - Law), Antony T. Anghie (National Univ. of Singapore - Law; Univ. of Utah - Law), and Lucy F. Reed (National Univ. of Singapore - Law). The Eighth Forum will be held at the National University of Singapore on August 12-14, 2019. The deadline for applications is January 31, 2019. The call is here.

The 2019 edition of the Frankfurt Investment Law Workshop will take place on March 8-9 at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. The topic is: "International Investment Law in the Age of Digitalization." The program is here. Attendance is free, but subject to registration. If you are interested in participating, please contact Sabine Schimpf by February 23. 2019.

The history of modern international law is often told as a fable of Jewish moral cosmopolitanism. Many recent accounts of the lawyer, law professor, and judge Hersch Lauterpacht (1897-1960) confirm this narrative by positing that his pioneering ideas of international human rights, crimes against humanity, and the laws of armed conflict derive from his personal experience of antisemitism, the Holocaust, and refugeedom. Implicitly or explicitly, this meta-narrative frequently situates politics in opposition to law, and frames Zionism as the particularistic pole opposite the putative universalism of twentieth-century Jewish legal cosmopolitanism. This chapter challenges this view through a novel reconstruction of Lauterpacht’s biography based on newly discovered archival sources in English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Polish. Against the trend towards apolitical or antipolitical narratives, this chapter argues that Lauterpacht’s political investment in the Zionist movement shaped his legal imagination of modern international law.

On March 7, 2019, the T.M.C. Asser Instituut will host, in coordination with the Amsterdam Center for International Law, the Manchester International Law Centre, Oxford International Organizations, and Oxford University Press, a conversation between Niels Blokker and Gabrielle Marceau, hosted by Catherine Brölmann, on "Two Souls in One Breast: The International Institutional Lawyer as Scholar and as Practitioner." A description is here.

A call for papers has been issued for the McGill University's 12th Annual Graduate Law Conference, which will be held in Montreal on May 8-9, 2019. The conference will be held in collaboration with the Dean Maxwell and Isle Cohen Doctoral Seminar Series in International Law. The theme is: "Law: Reactive or Proactive?" This seminar will take the form of a half-day panel discussion on international law topics inspired by the conference theme. The call is here.

A call for engaged listeners has been issued for a workshop on "Protection of the Environment in Relation to Armed Conflict – Beyond the ILC," which will take place on March 7-8, 2019, at the Faculty of Law of the University of Hamburg. The call is here.